October 20, 1982
MURDER CHARGE DROPPED, HE'S FREE MAN AGAIN
Betsy A. Lehman and Joseph M. Harvey, Globe Staff
A 30-year-old Roxbury man who was sentenced to death and who spent 10
years in prison for a murder he said he did not commit was freed yesterday
in Massachusetts Superior Court.
All charges against Lawyer Johnson of Dorr street, Roxbury, were
dismissed, based on new evidence from a witness to a 1971 murder who now
says that Johnson was not the guilty man. The witness, who was 10 years
old when the murder was committed, says the real killer was the man who
testified against Johnson in two previous trials.
Shortly before noon yesterday, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge James P.
McGuire accepted the recommendation of Asst. Dist. Atty. Thomas J. Mundy
that charges against Johnson, who was facing a third trial in the murder
of James Christian, 30, of Chelsea, be dismissed. The third trial was
ordered after the new witness came forward in 1981.
Kenneth Meyers, the man who previously identified Johnson as the killer,
is now serving a long sentence in Walpole state prison for robbery and
refuses to testify again. Without his testimony, the prosecution had no
case.
Dawnielle Montiero, a neighbor in the Mission Hill project, has said she
saw Meyers shoot Christian but was afraid to say so. Mundy has contended
that the long delay before Montiero's testimony and her friendship with
Johnson raised doubts about the reliability of her testimony.
Christian, a reported drug addict, was shot twice in the face as he came
out of the doorway of a Mission Hill public housing project on Prentiss
street on Dec. 17, 1971. Johnson has said all along that he was not at the
scene, but in two trials could not prove it.
The first trial, in 1972, resulted in Johnson's conviction for first
degree murder and Judge Wilfred J. Paquet ordering the mandatory death
sentence. On appeal, the Supreme Judicial Court set aside the conviction
and sentence in 1974 because Meyers, the principal prosecution witness,
had been allowed to withhold the identities of two alleged witnesses to
the shooting.
A second trial in November 1974, at which Meyers again identified Johnson
as the killer, ended in a second degree murder conviction with a mandatory
life sentence.
In 10 years, Johnson has been incarcerated at the Walpole, Norfolk and
Concord correctional institutions.
In an interview yesterday in his mother's house, where he has lived since
he was released in February on bail, Johnson said that "anger destroys,"
but still he is bitter about the legal system that twice convicted him,
once to death, and once to life in prison. He accused prosecutors of
manipulating both the jury and the testimony because they cared only about
getting a conviction, not about the truth.
"It was a legal lynching," he said. The prosecution, he said, "fabricated
and conspired" with Meyers. Both juries were all white; the murder victim
was white, too, and Johnson, who is black, said the racial fears of the
jurors were played on by the prosecution.
"I totally believed in the system of justice," he said. "My faith in the
system is gone."
(Mundy, who was also the prosecutor in the original case, yesterday called
Johnson's release a "travesty of justice."
("We reluctantly dismissed the indictment because of the age of the case
and the unavailability of witnesses," Mundy told The Associated Press.)
Johnson said he has little interest in voting, doesn't really feel "part
of the crowd," yet, but opposes capital punishment. "Two wrongs don't make
a right," he said.
In prison, Johnson learned to paint, cook and to be a barber. He is
enrolled in a beauty academy now to learn to be a hairdresser. He hopes
the hairdressing will support him until he can make it as a serious
artist. Art is his passion, the one part of his life in which he said he
feels complete confidence.
Perhaps most of all, however, Lawyer Johnson learned in prison to rely on
no one but himself, he said.
"I am like an atom," he said intently, "that has direction entirely of its
own. I don't like to be attached."
Maintaining aloofness from the depression and violence of prison and
thinking of himself as an observer, said Johnson, got him through the last
10 years. Sometimes he fasted for a week at a time, just to improve his
willpower, he said. He found he had to make something in his cell that
would make the bars and cement slab walls disappear from his
consciousness, he said.
"I thought, what can I do? It had to be something creative, supporting,
life-giving," said Johnson, a tall, reed-thin man with close-cropped hair.
"Art was a form of escapism."
Johnson said he learned how to paint and got his first supplies from the
nonprofit Massachusetts Prison Art Project. From then on, nearly every
day, he stroked brilliant colors of acrylic paint onto canvas. He said he
visualized scenes outside the prison walls and painted them.
He has had paintings in some 15 art shows, and has won several prizes.
Some artists have told Johnson his work looks like that of Kandinsky.
Johnson, who read everything he could about art in prison libraries, said
he had never even heard of Kandinsky before.
One of his favorite paintings, called "Atom," shows a single black figure
in an overwhelming, animated abstract jungle.
Michael Fields, a spokesman for the Campaign Against Restoration of the
Death Penalty, said Johnson's case "is another illustration of the
injustice of the death penalty. If he had been executed, these new
developments would not have done him much good," Fields said.
Johnson's lawyer Michael Avery of Boston said, "If he had been executed in
1972 we would have lost some of the beautiful art he has created."
Clearly, what is most painful to Johnson is all that he missed. He said
his family, with six sisters and two brothers, would have had fewer
problems if he had been there. When he got out of prison, he was shocked
to find another generation of young people had taken his place.
"So many things," he said, asked what he would have done with his 20s. His
quick, animated voice slowed and became quiet. "I would have married, had
children, my own apartment, a car. Everything a man needs to feel
adequate. I know I would have had it.
"I can't make up for that."
Johnson's priority right now is to earn enough money to move away, perhaps
to New York, Washington or California, where he wants an apartment of his
own. He thinks a new city will help him stop thinking about prison and may
afford more acceptance of his art.
"I know if I get out of Boston, I'll get over," he said. "I haven't tapped
one-third of my creative potential. I believe I have a future."